Director Cary Fukunaga jumps from the gritty to the classic with ‘Jane Eyre’

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In this film publicity image released by Focus Features, Mia Wasikowska is shown in a scene from "Jane Eyre." (AP Photo/Focus Features, Laurie Sparkham)

In this film publicity image released by Focus Features, Michael Fassbender, left, and Mia Wasikowska are shown in a scene from "Jane Eyre." (AP Photo/Focus Features, Laurie Sparham)

Cary Fukunaga and actress Mia Wasikowska are photographed in San Francisco during a promotional tour on March 2, 2011. Fukunaga is the director for his new film, a remake of Jane Eyre. Fukunaga is an up-and-coming film director who grew up in Oakland and attended UC Santa Cruz. (Gary Reyes /Mercury News)

SAN FRANCISCO — Cary Joji Fukunaga has always loved nothing better than steeping himself in the narrative riches of the past.

Born and raised in Oakland and its environs, Fukunaga went on to study history at UC Santa Cruz, before turning his eye to the art of film. He now brings a scholarly passion for research to every movie he directs, from his breakthrough hit, the illegal immigrant thriller “Sin Nombre,” to his current adaptation of Charlotte Brönte’s 19th-century heartbreaker “Jane Eyre,” which opens Friday in the South Bay.

Kicking back in a jaunty cap and clunky black glasses during a recent press junket, Fukunaga comes across more ivory tower than Tinseltown in his demeanor.

“I research every single detail. You have to. I feel like you to have to research everything to a neurotic level. Not all of it makes it into the picture, but all of it influences what the movie becomes,” says the hot indie director. “We spent a lot of time on things like what kind of sleeves did they wear, were they puffy or not, and would the bride and groom face each other or would they face the vicar?

“Still no definitive word on that, by the way. So we used the Queen Victoria wedding as the reference point.”

Make no mistake, Fukunaga prizes authenticity, but he is a showman first and an egghead second. Indeed, he and star Mia Wasikowska, best known for “Alice in Wonderland,” ended up loathing and despising the period-appropriate sleeves, so they decided to push the setting of the tale to the 1840s instead of the 1830s.

“Neither of us cared for the 1830s fashions that much. The sleeves just weren’t flattering. She would have been wearing these huge poofy things the whole time, and Mia has such nice arms. So we wanted to show them off,” he says, to which the 21-year-old actress responds with a giggle. “Once we made that decision, it affected everything from what kinds of things people would be discussing at the parties, in terms of the politics of the day, to what they were eating.”

As it happens, getting into the Gothic zeitgeist was a snap because they were housed at a suitably eerie chateau while shooting in the misty hills of Derbyshire, England.

“I thought my room was haunted, so I had to change places,” says Fukunaga, 33, only half joking. “I had a really spooky feeling. There’s a real sense of isolation and cold. The castles had, like, 900 years of cold trapped in their walls. If they call it the new roof, that means it’s from the 1600s.”

“It was a total haunted mansion,” agrees the pixie-ish Wasikowska. “My sister came to visit me, and we ended up sleeping in the same bed because it was that scary.”

Goosebumps and ball gowns light this swoon-worthy epic about a little orphan cast out by callous relatives, brutalized by her schoolmaster and finally dispatched to be governess at a formidable English manse. Second only to the Jane Austen canon, this definitely qualifies as chick lit hit for the “Masterpiece Theatre” set.

Many a generation of schoolgirl has chewed her fingernails down to the nub as this cape-clad plain Jane (played by the gamin Wasikowska) trades banter with the glowering lord of the manor, Rochester (Michael Fassbender of “Inglourious Basterds”) under the watchful eye of the redoubtable housekeeper (the estimable Judi Dench). They smolder, quite slowly and properly but with unmistakable heat, until a cruel twist of fate leads Jane to escape onto the fog-shrouded moors.

On making the leap from his gritty immigrant drama to this lavish period piece, Fukunaga is characteristically nimble-witted: “After spending months riding trains, I needed a change of scenery. I wanted castles and horse-riding.”

Still, he and Wasikowska admit some trepidation at tackling such a legendary heroine.

“The audience is going to take an original piece for what it is, but with a character that’s been around for so long, a character people know and love, you really have to hope that they can embrace another version,” says the actress in the lilting accent of her native Australia. “Which is what I love about the arts — I love seeing different interpretations of things over time.”

Indeed, “Jane Eyre” represents the sweet spot for hopelessly romantic remakes. Over the years, there have been at least 18 big-screen versions of the stormy period romance, including a 1910 silent film, the classic 1943 Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine version, the 1970 George C. Scott and Susannah York take, the 1983 TV miniseries with Timothy Dalton, and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1996 film starring Anna Paquin.

“There’s, like, 45,000 different versions of this — there’s musicals, dramas and miniseries,” notes Fukunaga. “I went on IMDB (Internet Movie Database), and people were having vicious fights about which is their favorite version, so that’s the last time I went on IMDB.”

Adds Wasikowska: “It’s a testament to the story really that Jane continues to speak to people, even though the book is not getting any younger.”

Putting his stamp on the masterpiece turned out to be quite tricky. For instance, Fukunaga originally shot a lot of delightfully creepy footage of flies (a la “The Amityville Horror”) that ended up getting the ax. He wanted to underscore the terror of the story. After all, the ominous Thornfield Manor houses many a dark mystery, including the cackling of a mad creature who seems to dwell in its very walls.

“When you tour these great English houses in the north country, there are always thousands of dead flies, so I wanted to include that element of death and decay when Jane is wandering around the house and she encounters portraits of people long turned to dust,” says the director. “But the deeper you get into the script, the harder it is to walk that line between romance and horror because, if you go more into that horror realm, you start to lose the momentum of the love story, which is what people react to. So you end up cutting back on the horror elements.

“By the end of the day, there were no more flies.”

Ever mindful of the social context of literature, he also wanted to highlight the racial climate of the period by casting a black man as Rochester’s valet and showing the character’s interracial family life (Fukunaga is the son of a Japanese-American father and a Swedish-American mother) but again stuck to his sense of discipline.

“I’m always interested in politics and history, and I really wanted to show the colonial reach of the empire at that time and how the British shaped the world, even in terms of what’s happening today geopolitically. It’s great as texture, but it has nothing to do with the force of the narrative,” he says ruefully, “so it had to go.”

Karen D'Souza is the theater critic for the Mercury News and the Bay Area News Group papers. She is a three-time Pulitzer juror, a former USC/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and a longtime member of the Glickman Drama Jury and the American Theatre Critics Association. She has a Master's Degree in Journalism from UC Berkeley. She is a Twitter addict (@KarenDSouza4), a fangirl and a mommy and her writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and American Theatre Magazine.